World events

I hope we have all been following the Occupy Wall Street (OWS) action that is unfolding before us. Why are they protesting? Hopefully OWS is not only due to the rich-poor gap -although, that is reason enough.

In the Greater Antilles, Taino is in the mind. Taino is nation and movement, ancestry and identity. Taino, the term, is mentioned in the early chronicles of conquest, recorded to mean "the good people" or the "noble people."

The Itika Guasu Investment Fund may have broken new ground in Bolivia and Latin America, and internationally. But the negotiation process exposed "a model of social humiliation" that still threatens impoverished Indigenous people wherever they press a valid claim to valuable property.

This week, nearly 40 passengers (unarmed peace activists and media people) will board The Audacity of Hope, a U.S. flagged boat, which will set sail from Greece and join the international Freedom Flotilla II.

In March 2011, the U.S. government filed a response brief to two appeals by two Guantanamo Bay detainees. They had been convicted of "providing material support for terrorism" and their defense contended that the charge was not a war crime subject to military tribunal jurisdiction.

A few weeks ago I stopped watching the news. Nothing else was going on in the world except for the Osama Bin Laden death frenzy. Okay he’s dead, but he was going to die anyway. We’ll all die eventually. It will be news the day no one dies. The TV can stay on then.

Many people angrily responded to my previous column on this subject by claiming that the U.S. military had merely applied the Apache leader Geronimo’s name to the U.S. military operation to hunt down bin Laden, and had not applied the name to bin Laden.

So it’s official: the code name for Bin Laden was "Geronimo." To refer to a terrorist like Bin Laden, whom some have compared to Hitler, with the name of an honored and respected Native American warrior is the ultimate insult to every Native American veteran who fought in wars for this country an

Included in the millions of people throughout the United States and around the world who welcomed the demise of Osama Bin Laden were American Indians. Not since Adolf Hitler has there been such a universally despised figure, so replete with immoral sentience.

I’m opposed to the death penalty, as most judges are in private. It’s not something we can say out loud when the most common reason is not trusting our own lives to the system that decides life or death for others. We can’t make a habit of admitting the system makes mistakes.

The US government may have captured and killed Osama Bin Laden with a surgical strike, but it also dropped a bombshell on Native America in the process. “We’ve ID’d Geronimo,” said the voice of the Navy SEAL who reported the hunt for Osama bin Laden was over.

Half-life refers to how long it takes for radioactive material to lose half of its radioactivity. In spite of extensive blood quantum research and years of containment, social science has not yet determined the half-life of Indians. My cousin Ray Sixkiller is a living example of the problem.